Mumbai: Social networking site Facebook is spreading its services webwide with `Facebook Connect', which will encourage users to increasingly network with friends.

Addressing an audience of industry executives, software makers and media at Facebook's second annual conference, Mark Zuckerberg, 24, the founder-leader of the youth web movement that encourages users to share information with friends, said Facebook will run its features on affiliated sites outside its own.

He said `Facebook Connect' will transform the social network from a ''walled'' private site to a web-wide phenomena, where software makers, with user permission, can tap member data for use on their sites. ''Facebook Connect is our version of Facebook for the rest of the web,'' Zuckerberg added.

Facebook, which started off as a socialising site for students at Harvard University in 2004, now has 90 million members against 24 million over a year ago.
It is also overtaken rival MySpace to emerge as the world's largest social networking site.

With over 400,000 developers worldwide, Facebook now lets designers build software on affiliated sites, for mobile phones or as services that tap desktop applications like Microsoft's Outlook e-mail system.

''As time goes on, less of this movement is going to be about Facebook and the platform we have created and more about the applications other people have built," Zuckerberg said.

Facebook is pushing for parity between applications on and off the site, he said, adding that in doing so, it is positioning itself to play a role similar to what Microsoft Corporation has long had for developers within its Windows operating system.

And, like Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, a Harvard drop-out and a shy programmer turned billionaire. And, as he pushes his Facebook, he hopes to build a product that allows people to be able to ''see and feel each other's presence.''